No Risk, No Reward!

Anthony: No risk, no reward. It’s a very true saying. I truly believe in it. When you think about business, if you don’t take any risks, how are you going to get ahead? How are you going to leapfrog ahead? Remember, a few weeks ago, I was in Florida, and I did a video on doing big things. If you do little things, and if you don’t do things above and beyond what others do, you are not going to be able to get ahead. It’s just the way it goes.

When I think about risks, I understand that everybody has a different level of risk tolerance. You got to be able to sleep at night. You can’t do things too far beyond what you’re comfortable with, but you’ve got to push that comfort level. You’ve got to push what you’re willing to do. I like that saying, get comfortable being uncomfortable. When I think about all these agents, we train agents literally across North America, then we have hundreds of agents here in our company. I’m in touch with broker-owners every day.

The one thing that I always notice is everyone is scared of failure. Everyone is scared to take a risk and then have something potentially not work out. It always amazes me because it’s like, I don’t think people understand the truth about– I guess what I mean is this. I have failed in more initiatives than I have succeeded. That’s a fact. We try different advertising campaigns, we try different messaging, we try all different things, and I have had more of them not work than work. I feel some people hearing that might be like, “That’s not true. How would you have any success then?” No, it is true. I swear to you.

We’ve tried more TV campaigns that haven’t worked. We’ve tried more recruiting methods that haven’t worked, but once in a while when we hit one right, boom, we have a lot of success. That’s business. If you listen to videos, and I’ve actually been doing this, of Jeff Bezos talk about Amazon. He talks about he’s like, “We’ve screwed up more things on the way to getting things right.”

They were telling a story how they– I don’t know. They were given out a certain book on the Kindle years ago. Then they realized they were giving it out for free and violating the publisher or their distributor’s rules, whatever it was. Instead of taking it back from the people they gave it to for free, they took it back from everybody. Even the people that paid. They took it back from everybody. That’s more of an operational failure and heck companies have those too. We have those sometimes.

It more comes down to going for certain things. Maybe it’s trying a new advertising campaign, maybe it’s trying a new advertisement, maybe it’s getting on video like I’m doing right now. Maybe it is buying something, buying a piece of property. This is how I feel. Everybody’s so quick to say they want to be successful and so quick to say they want to make it big, and they want to do this, and they want to do that. Then as soon as some risk comes along, “I don’t want to do that. That would be scary. I may fail.” Folks, fail. Fail. I can’t emphasize it enough. Have some failures. If you’re not having any failures, you’re not trying hard enough. You’re not.

You just have to look at things a little bit differently. Take legal things, for example. This is something interesting. This is a little bit of a different topic, but it’s interesting. I see agents sometimes get a bad review, I talked about this on a video on here a month ago. I’ll see an agent get a bad review, or maybe get someone that goes to the board on them. They get so bent out of shape for weeks.

I’m like, “Why? You sold 40 homes last year. You dealt with 200 clients. You’ve done that every year for 10 years. Once every decade, you get some psycho who doesn’t like your service, and you’re getting completely bent out of shape about it and letting it ruin your day, ruin your life, ruin your business? For what? Because of one screwball?” Or they go completely changing everything they do because of one issue, and it’s like, “No, no, no, no, no.”

There’s a guy one time who told me– great guy. He passed away. He was in our company. He was a great agent. He was a CEO of an international company. “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, don’t fail on me. Don’t fail” He was in one of my trainings right in here years ago and I was talking about how it’s okay to have a customer who’s not totally happy once in a while. It’s okay to have someone have something not work.

He said at that time, he put his hand up and he said, “Anthony, we used to call it an allowable level of cost dissatisfaction.” That’s slightly an off-topic from what I’m talking about here, but it isn’t really because when it comes down to his fears. Too many of you are loaded with fears. You’re worried about failing. You’re worried about risk. You’re worried about this, you’re worried about that. Stop worrying and start taking action.

I was doing a training last week, and I said to everyone, I repeated it, I said, “Take video, for example.” I said, “My shitty iPhone Facebook videos will beat your not doing a video every day of every week.” Like right now. Is this like crazy production? “Whoa, look at these angles. Wow.” No, I’m just holding the goddamn iPhone in front of the office because I came by to drop something off. I’ve been thinking about this. I’ve been thinking about the fear of failure. You all need to start taking more risks. Go for it. Go for things. If you fail, great, embrace the failure, learn from it and move on, don’t let it derail you into not taking action, into not doing new things. Make sense?

What I’m saying is– Like the example I gave with the person who got, I don’t know, some board complaint a week ago, and I’m like, “Who cares?” “This has never happened to me in 25 years.” I’m like, “Great. Well, you’ve been lucky. So what? Don’t let it screw you up.” Then I was talking to a lawyer about it and they’re like, “Oh, this happens to agents.” That person that I’m talking about, this person normally isn’t fearful of anything. It’s just a sense of pride with their business, which is totally understandable. The two worlds can collide, so that isn’t a perfect example.

What I’m getting at is, if you are right now in a situation where you, for example– let’s go through some examples. You are looking at a new lead source, and you’re wondering, “Will this work?” You’re not going to know until you try it. You’re not going to know. Let’s say you’re looking at a new real estate company. This is another one. I could do a half-hour sermon on this. I have people tell us all the time, “I know I’m better off at your company. I know it. I’m convinced of it.”

You’re going to be making them just a little nervous. I’m like, “What? You just got through telling me you know you’re better off. You are just going to not make a move. You just told me you’ll have more of a life because of our services, you’ll have more of this, you’ll have more that blah, blah, blah, and you’re going to stay.” What the hell sense does that make? It’s fear of moving. It’s fear of change. Fear of failure.

I mentioned lead sources, try it. Mentioned moving company. Anybody who is not getting what they think they need at a company– Now, you might not be right about what you need. We get some agents, “Wow, I need to be trained this way.” No, we teach you the way you should be trained.

Anyway, back on topic. The point I’m getting at is, it might be leads, it might be moving company, it might be buying an investment property, it might be dealing with clients in a different way. It might be some type of email campaign. I don’t know what it is. The point I’m getting at is there is something in your life right now that you’re scared to do because of failure because of risk. What if I fail? What if it doesn’t work out? What if this?

Enough with the what-ifs. Take action. You should want some failures. You should want some things to not work out, because if that’s how it goes, then you know you’re pushing the envelope. If everything you are doing is succeeding, you’re not doing enough things. You’re not. Sorry.

Hope you guys take something in from that. Have a great day, everyone. Enjoy your Sunday.